What I learned from Tracey Emin about regeneration

CW: Abortion

I left the Tate Modern’s latest headline show, Tracey Emin: A Second Life, feeling unmoved by the artworks. I found the paintings somewhat derivative and the neon signs plain tacky, and lots of the text featured on her artworks struck me as faux-poetic and edgy. That is not to say I got nothing out of this exhibition: what moved me was not so much the individual works as the force of the exhibition as a whole – its conception and emotional reach – and I left with a far stronger respect for Tracey Emin than when I entered.

The first thing that struck me about Tracey Emin: A Second Life was how busy it was. The first room was filled with a constant beeping of alarms, as the crowds of people had no choice but to stand too close to the artworks due to a lack of space. Half of the screen showing her film, Why I Never Became a Dancer, was obscured by the audience’s silhouettes. A queue wrapped around the sides of her installation, Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made. It is no surprise that this exhibition is a hit – Tracey Emin is one of the most famous British artists of our time. But the fact that the visitors were predominantly women of all ages, all eagerly and closely engaging with the many, many artworks on display, is something to be noted. People have claimed to leave teary-eyed, having had a visceral reaction to Emin’s work – clearly, her works resonate deeply with her audience.

Such an emotive response feels particularly significant because Emin’s work has so often been discussed in terms of scandal, confession, and spectacle. Yet in the exhibition, this sensationalism falls away, and what remains is an artist who has spent decades refusing to disguise pain, humiliation, desire, grief, and shame. Even though the work did not move me aesthetically, I could still feel the force of that refusal. There is something powerful about watching a woman’s emotional life, once dismissed as messy or excessive, being treated with tact and seriousness by an institution like Tate Modern, and by the crowds gathered inside it. For much of Emin’s career, that emotional exposure was treated as something embarrassing for its confessional and raw treatment of female experience. What feels different in A Second Life is that this abrasiveness is celebrated. In that sense, the exhibition measures a broader cultural shift in what kinds of feelings are acceptable as art. To see her work so positively received, then, is the culmination of a lifetime of scrutiny which came both from herself and from those around her.

The exhibition is clearly succeeding on its own terms. People are queuing up to see it, and, more importantly, responding to it with real emotional intensity. And it was precisely seeing Emin’s triumph which moved me, rather than the artworks themselves. If there is one thing clear from Emin’s work, it is that her life has been full of struggle, even after achieving fame as an artist. The centrepiece of the exhibition, the powerful film How it Feels, captures this well. In it, she discusses ‘how it feels’ to have an abortion in a sober, neutral, deeply moving way. She travels to the clinic at which the abortion happened, and discusses what went through her mind before, during, and following the procedure. It is the piece which stuck with me most, for the precise reason that Emin describes how her traumatic abortion changed her self-perception from a ‘failure’ of an artist, to a ‘failure’ of a human being. If there is one thing Tracey Emin is not, it is a ‘failure’. 

It was, therefore, a strange feeling to see artworks so full of self-hatred become transformed into something victorious for Emin. She, who was once deemed the ‘enfant terrible’ of the Young British Artists, is now an inspiration, having achieved what any aspiring artist dreams of: a survey exhibition which is as vast and unfiltered as it is reverent and sincere. By the gift shop, there is a notebook where visitors can write about how the exhibition made them feel. The most recent entry stated: “Thank you Tracey, you’ve inspired me to finally start painting again”. A Second Life.

What this exhibition taught me is that what matters in Emin’s work is the permission it seems to give: to be ugly, exposed, excessive, wounded, honest – and to make something anyway. I did not leave the exhibition thinking Tracey Emin was my new favourite artist, but I left feeling proud of her, and grateful for the fact that an artist can remain difficult, even unappealing in places, and still resonate strongly with people. The exhibition is an example of what can happen when an artist survives long enough to outlive the versions of herself that others tried to fix in place. I left feeling that making art, and continuing to make it, can itself be a form of survival. That, more than any single work in the show, is what stayed with me.